


but if you love the terrible

by nostomaniac



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-25 21:03:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18582535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostomaniac/pseuds/nostomaniac
Summary: nagito komaeda ponders the theodicy of hope as the boy whose eyes so enrapture his heart sets him ablaze.or: the trial that is as much his as it is teruteru hanamura's.





	but if you love the terrible

 

There exists in some liminal space between hope and despair Nagito Komaeda, and he has had no reason to doubt that before.

 

And neither does he now, even while both war bellicose on the tip of his tongue and drip out of his lips like honey. The fringes of his vision are vertiginously dark; at its epicentre is a boy with eyes like green gasoliers, lit with a hope so dangerous, so _enticing_ , that he can’t help but laugh, and laugh, and laugh with a such a corrupt abandon that he hates himself.

 

Who _was_ he, a person as inconsequential as dust in the wind, as incomparably _small_ as a blip on an old vinyl, to revel in the sheer determination rippling from Hajime Hinata? Nothing. Nothing at all.

 

And frantic as he may be, he doesn’t misconstrue the darkness behind that hope. The betrayal. The shock. The _hatred_. For Hajime to see him now as he is – the desperation, the _worthlessness_ – it almost brings him to his knees. What bad luck. What incorrigible bad luck.

 

_At the back of his mind, he wonders: does his heart remember how to love the sort of ordinary beauty that Hajime Hinata is? The permanence? Or will his curse be to forever search for the Super High School Level in him?_

_But of course. There is no beauty in normalcy._

 

“It was me,” he whispers, almost intimately, his eyes fixed on Hajime (who visibly flinches, though he stands firm) like a deathbed’s prayer. He feels disembodied, as if his every iota of his very being were disintegrating in the febrile heat of Hinata’s eyes.

 

The hubris in Komaeda urges him to reach out and claim that redemption, true and pure, as he watches the fire reach its apotheosis in Hajime’s eyes.

 

“Me, who set up the knife under the table before the party started—

 

“Me, who used the power cord to move to the table in the dark—

 

“And of course, it was me who set up that power outage.”

 

His hands are shaking sporadically as he raises them in ingratiating triumph. In his darkening periphery he sees a tableaux of horror – an elaborate play in thirteen acts unfolding across the faces of his classmates, and the perverse smile that dances on his lips is so painfully removed from the lexicon that they can understand.

 

_Privately, Komaeda finds himself again in the storage room, and all things considered it is an inopportune place to be so… fascinated. So fascinated by the three irons he’d found by pure chance. The heat undulating in waves onto his face was once breath and life, once dead matter, once the Sun, once a massively dense singularity in this universe where everything existed, nowhere else._

_He rolls up his sleeve and regards the old cordilleras of welt and burn underneath with a clinical interest. He holds his forearm up to the heat. It feels almost nostalgic._

_Luck, good and bad, has been his only impetus. His vision fills with airplane wrecks and dead pets and money and blood. It is his sole contribution – and because it is_ his _, it means next to nothing – to the chronology of events that he’s borne witness to, and that he will not._

_He is loved,_ adored _by the same pendulum that has swung with predictable steadiness between his hope and his despair for his entire life. And that love will be his gift to hope until the cycle finally ends with him._

_With that giddy thought in mind, he slowly, ritualistically, picks up the iron._

His knuckles whiten against his podium as a shudder of something lances through him, and when he looks up again – he’s forgotten that his eyes had fallen to the ground – he realises that he’d been talking, and his voice has been steady, and his classmates stand around him, rapt terror plain on their young faces.

 

He does not see his friends. That would be selfish.

 

Instead, he flips a switch in the frenetic machinery of his brain, and painfully forces himself to look only at the light, the limitless _potential_ within each of them.

 

 _Show me,_ he thinks, as he gazes slowly at each of them. _Show me your despair. Show me the hope that will destroy you, redeem you, baptise you._

_Show me that your hope is worthy of the world._

His gaze lights on the murderer, and Komaeda prays that his hope will spill over like froth from his mouth – beautiful and tragic, ambrosia of an Ultimate’s making.

 

His gaze lights on the vandalised portrait of Byakuya Togami, and he prays that he will be a worthy sacrifice for this offertory of hope.

 

And he bathes in the class trial – this lavish cornucopia of despair – and entire movements, diapasons of music buffet his skin, seductive.

 

He can taste it, heady, licentious, full. Against his skin, caressing his cheek, blooming in the hearts of the world’s chosen. _Hope_.

 

Hope, perverse and grey, in the kaleidoscope of his classmates’ faces (the hope of survival at another’s expense) as Teruteru Hanamura is executed.

 

Hope in Peko Pekoyama’s eyes, saving the master of her life’s purpose with the swing of a bat.

 

Hope in Mikan Tsumiki’s trembling hands and sanguine cheeks, her mouth speaking interminable litanies to her one true love.

 

 _And Komaeda sees it – has always seen it – that clarion clear line. That blinding, blue-white, agonising line to hope. Unadulterated. Unerring. And so, so_ beautiful _. Death, pain, destruction, despair – they are all servants of hope. All meaningless pawns._

_Just as he is._

_He sees the solution, the machinations, with the breathtaking clarity he never has in his waking moments. Without the pain he’s come to know as an old friend._

_He’s convinced it’s the missing factor in the equation. His penance for being nothing but corrupted, nothing but despairing. Nothing but lucky. At the end of his life, he will be vindicated. He has to be._

_And in the darkest crevasses of his heart, he envisions himself as hope_ embodied, _and thinks that there can be nothing else in this life that he could do that would give him worth._

And so he clings to hope. His lifeline. His raison d'être.

 

Hope – until he finds the one thing that shatters whatever is left of his humanity.

**Author's Note:**

> i should really learn to format these so that they're more readable anyway gay rights


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